History

See </campaigns/TOS/background/History%20of%20Humankind.md>

Astrography

Pending further research, the location of the setting is within a couple hundred light years of the Sol system, in which there are hundreds of habitable or near-habitable worlds, as determined by the original civilization of Sol that expired near the end of the 3rd millennium CE. Many of these worlds were targeted for colonization, and many more were sent automated terraforming missions, to eventually make them habitable within centuries or millennia.

Most of these worlds were forgotten about for about 2,000 years, as humans survived in the marginal habitats and eventual handful of systems granted to them by the kindness of the Il'um race.

In the 3rd Starfaring Age, beginning in the 5th millennium CE, the Pax Andromadae has allowed unprecedented peace and prosperity in the older (now "core" worlds), but has created a need for ever more expansion worlds, to offload undesirable populations, and increase the reach of House Andromedes as rival houses constantly build their power base. And so, she bade the people to expand into the many systems long since claimed by the Ancestors. Surely many have perished in the interim, but many will welcome the Queen's light and justice with open arms--won't they?

It has now been X years since the expansion began. Y worlds, many of which contain "divergent" races--alien, but human ancestors--have been taken into the fold. A new governmental apparatus has been built to accomodate this vast Insterstellar Empire. None of these colonists asked to be ruled by a strange, foreign queen, but few have advanced far enough to contest her rule. Few...not all.

And still many worlds await colonization, the way having been paved by automata millennia past. Hundreds of worlds, in various states of readiness for human settlement, await in the expansion region, and the Queen is happy to issue land grants in exchange for loyalty, mineral rights, etc etc.

In those early, wild years of the Great Frontier, law is sparse, but crime is not. The Queen's Justice is the only constant, and must be maintained by the Star Rangers--an elite force of diverse peacekeepers, loyal to the Queen, tasked with shining her divine light upon the furthest corners of her rule. That, or taking huge bribes from local crime lords to look the other way. Whatevs.

Technology

The ships that colonized that Expansion Region long ago traveled at a fraction of the speed of light. Their journeys lasted for decades or even centuries. Every one of them departed a vast, peaceful civilization spread throughout the Sol system, and every one outlived it. They now find themselves subject to a state descended from a random few survivors of that civilization--genetically descended, sure, but ideologically alien. Nobility, unrestrained capitalism, zealous religiosity--all concepts foreign to the colonists, though some rediscovered them, or evolved stranger ways of life still.

In any case, the current technology level is determined by the Star Empire's finest ships and devices, not the forgotten relics of old, whatever they've evolved into. Here are brief descriptions of the most important technologies.

Getting Around

Electric and photonic propulsion was all the rage in the 3rd millennium. It allowed for practical--if rather sedate--travel between the planets of the Sol system. A few weeks to get to a nearby moon, a few months to reach an outer planet, a year or two to circumnavigate the Oort Cloud...it was rather like the Golden Age of Sail.

Today's ships embarass those of old. Boasting Warp Drives, which compress the very fabric of spacetime in the direction of travel, ordinary civilian craft ply the solar system anywhere between a quarter and half the speed of light. Every planet is mere hours away from the solar core, and inner worlds are but a taxi fare away.

This technology has its limits, of course. Normal warp travel keeps speeds below 50% of light, maybe a tad higher for emergency or military purposes, but not much faster to avoid relativistic problems. Time compression isn't a major issue--what is an issue is induced radiation. Even at low speeds, care must be taken to avoid traveling directly into the solar wind, which quickly blue shifts into dangerous radiation. At high sublight speed, all ambient radiation becomes deadly.

Thankfully, interstellar travelers are not doomed to spend years hurtling between suns. All the better, since modern power reactors can't possibly keep a warp drive running for that long. Rather, there exists the vastly complex, N-dimensional maps of the Hyperlanes.

Hyperspace is simply all of space--not just the three dimensions of it that we see. As a two-dimensional fabric might be folded into a vast array of possible shapes into the third dimension, so our three-dimensional continuum is folded into an incomprehensibly tortuous shape in the 16+ actual dimensions of reality. The fact that they do not have any "thickness" of their own does not mean the dimensions do not exist; objects can "rotate" in and out of higher dimensional axes without displacing. The actual shape of the cosmos is determined by the motion of the great masses of Dark Matter moving around and throughout the real matter of the galaxy. The Dark Matter does not interact using any force except gravity--but gravity is, naturally, the force that determines the shape of spacetime. Early human scientists imagined Dark Matter as perhaps being great blobs floating freely along with the galaxies, but the shape of Hyperspace proves this intution incorrect. Like the galactic disk, they are largely flat--flattened by the same forces that flatten galactic and solar disks over time--but "flat" is a complex shape in 16 dimensions. With careful study over eons using fantastically sensitive gravitic sensors, the Il'um mapped Hyperspace eons ago, and have kept their maps up to date. They gifted knowledge of nearby hyperlanes to earlier humans, who have since learned to detect them.

Hyperlanes are--in the simplest analogy--narrow regions of space that, through chance, wind through interstellar space at a convenient enough shape (never a straight line, usually quite tortuous) to permit travel between the stars. When following the path, it is possible to build vast gravitic "sails" which can "catch" the "currents" of Hyperspace. It's analogous to catching a Trade Wind to cross the vast Atlantic in a sailing vessel. The reality is far, far more complex, but suffice to say, the geometry of Hyperspace can be exploited, as long as you have a very detailed map of Hyperspace in your area, and a device capable of capturing gravitational waves.

Modern warp drives are in fact hybrid systems; in one mode, they compress space for fast sublight travel, and in another mode, they "invert" into great gravitic sails to catch the "winds" of hyperlanes. In fact, military-grade drives have a third mode, which forms a gravitic shield that can stop almost any projectile--even photons--by subjecting it to powerful, extremely small hyperspace rotations that essentially disperse the energy in all directions back from which it came.

Of course, to keep things fun--I mean, because of science--the main body of every solar system produces enough authority over local spacetime to prevent any usable hyperlanes within a solar system (barring the strangest anomalies). Generally, there is a minimum radius--given the solar mass--that hyperlanes can remain stable in their weakest form, known as the Hyperlimit. For a star similar to Sol, the Hyper Limit is in the 8-12 light-hour range.

Gravity

For now, I'm going with artificial gravity continuing to require either acceleration or rotation. It's cheap and easy, whereas magical Star Trek gravity is incredibly hard, unbelievably expensive, and implies a whole bunch of technologies that would radically alter the state of balance, many of which we can't even conceive of yet (or at least I can't).

Planetfall

It's easy for big ships to stay in space--they just avoid crashing into planets. So how do people get up and down?

On civilized planets, there are megastructures that make the process quite inexpensive. Mass drivers do most of the work for cargo (and perhaps some bulk-rate passenger travel), flinging payloads directly into orbit using magnetic or even rotational propulsion. Others use space elevators--magnificently cost-effective, and they double as able to deliver payloads to orbit (or an orbital ring) or flinging them into interplanetary trajectories.

But our heroes aren't interested in transiting to civilized space. We want to land on exotic planets where there are no spaceports, and somehow get back into space. Good news: we can.

Generally speaking, you don't make planetfall in the same ship you FTL in. Hypersails require a ton of power--at minimum, you're talking about a fusion reactor, if not something much larger and more exotic. Either way, they're expensive and fragile, as are the Warp Drives they power. Why take all that mass down to a planet only to haul it back up again?

A ship capable of carrying a few dozen Rangers around deep space will probably be measured in megatons. Conversely, a small craft capable of descent, vertical takeoff and landing, atmospheric flight, and achieving orbit might weigh in at 1,000 tons or less--a tiny companion to its mothership.

The gold standard technology is the Closed-Cycle Nuclear Hybrid Jet engine. Meaning:

Given the need to land on a wide variety of landing sites, on a vast range of planetary geography and biomes, most such vehicles are not limited to landing on runways, and usually have little to no wing area (although they usually make use of body lift, especially for reentry). Instead, the most popular designs use a tilt-wing or tilt-engine approach, where main engines (usually two, sometimes a multiple of two), assisted by smaller attitude-control engines (which are generally not rocket or hypersonic capable), have enough thrust to land fully vertical or hover. Given the nuclear jet's endurance, hovering for long periods is actually a viable option when landing is impractical.

Such craft do not possess artificial gravity. Most of the time they are in use, gravity is unnecessary. Only during orbital maneuvers--the overwhelming majority of which are rendezvous with the mothership or planning reentry, at most lasting hours--do occupants experience zero-g.

Once docked with a mothership, descent ships are serviced and refueled. The fusion engines of motherships (or the secondary fusion "starter" engines for antimatter and gravitic-driven ships) can easily provide all the hypergolic fuel the descent ships require.

Human Needs

Humans have come a long way in 5,000 years (or whatever). But we still need to eat, drink, sleep, and all the other fun stuff. So how do we do it?

Food

A Ranger mothership can easily support a hydroponic garden indefinitely, as long as the crew are comfortable knowing what happens to their organic waste. As tempting as it is to condemn the crew to eat protein bars and wish for strawberries, hydroponic vegetable growth is easy, low-cost, and healthy. Some may say they prefer "natural" (i.e. planet-grown) food, and claim to be able to taste the difference. It really depends on who's in charge of your garden; the science is certainly up to the task of matching 21st century farmers.

What you won't find a whole lot of is meat. Not because it's inefficient--frontier worlds find that natural animals still offer a lot of endurance and flexibility compared to advanced cultured-meat factories--but because the core worlders forsook it long ago. Meat cultivation is not efficient for planets with billions of inhabitants, nor is it an especially great use of limited hydroponic capacity in space habitats. 21st century experiments with cultivation of live animal cells to reproduce "true" meat met with some success, but ultimately, the efficiency of plant cells could never be beaten by animal cells--a reality obvious to Biology 101 students, but not to the wishful thinking of Late-stage Capitalism. It turned out to be easier to modify the superficial properties of plants than the change the fundamental properties of animals. Humans got used to plant-based proteins millennia ago, and even weaned themselves from the need to make them look, feel, and taste like animal flesh.

In recent times, the practice of animal cultivation has returned--largely due to Divergents, but practiced as much if not more often by Frontier settlers, lacking the complex machinery required for modern plant-based protein production--and a taste for real, post-slaughter meat has infected the upper class and nobility. The Queen has outlawed the practice, save for religious exemption and economic necessity, but such decrees have only raised the price and sweetened the deal. For those of the Faith, eating slaughtered animal flesh is literally no less heinous than eating the flesh of a human. For the less pious masses, it is not so shocking, but equally alien and unappealing. That only seems to make it all the more delectable to those who consume it, who do so despite the re-emergence of a vast array of diseases and disorders long extinct since the abolition of meat-eating, such as obesity and most forms of cardiac disorder.

Drink

Thirst is, naturally, easily slaked aboard a modern starship or in a modern city, with water conservation technology having reached 100% efficiency long ago. And even if it hadn't, the waste products of fusion can be converted into drinking water using reasonably efficient processes.

For beverages of a different sort, one need not look far. Outside of a few unfortunate Divergents, alcohol remains readily digestible by humans, and its unpleasant side effects have long ago found cheap and easy cures (well, the physical ones, not so much the behavioural ones). The Faith has attempted to crack down on this most ancient of recreational drugs, but with little success.

Plant-based soft drinks--teas, juice, sodas, and the like--are abundant, and as easy to create as ever, being mostly water and partly plants.

Bizarre, alien drinks that only Divergents can safely consume are, of course, a thing--generally illegal outside protected space, quite dangerous for the wrong species to consume, yet...of course people do it.

Sleep

It's been 5,000 years. We still don't understand sleep. We just need it. Our brains need it. You could make some sort of weird human-shaped being that didn't need as much sleep, as long as you're cool with it having the intelligence of a lungfish. Similarly, we know how to modify the human brain to require less sleep--if you don't mind having a severe case of ADHD and possibly losing the power of speech.

To be human is to sleep. Suck it up.

Sex and Reproduction

We don't "need" sex, per se, but we certainly have powerful urges, and we still very much need to reproduce, at least for the species to survive if not the individual.

Birth control is, naturally, perfect. There are subtle genetic signals that can be toggled using safe, inexpensive, non-invasive procedures, usually done prior to puberty (along with a standard array of immunizations, hormonal regulators, etc), which disable fertility in both kinds of genitals. When reproduction is desired, it can be easily activated using over-the-counter means.

It is possible--not cheap, but not entirely out of the question for the middle class--to "pod" human embryos. Ideally this involves extrabodily fertilization, but the embryo can also be extracted. Human "pods" perfectly similate the conditions required for a fetus, handling all of its needs from just after fertilization to delivery--which, depending on desire--can be anywhere from on time to up to 9 months late. Experiments are ongoing to see how long humans can safely gestate beyond the limitations of the maternal frame. The 9 month limit is currently an accepted limit before abnormal brain development may occur.

Fighting

Symmetric Warfare

Fighting on the ground hasn't changed a whole lot. Guns were developed to be ideal, cheap, effective weapons against humans. Humans haven't changed much, so guns didn't need to.

In space, things are a bit different. The distances involved mean that traditional projectiles are incredibly easy to dodge--both because of how slowly they move, and how much warning they give their attacker. Photonic weapons are a bit better, since they arrive just at the moment they warn their attacker--but evasive maneuvers don't require knowledge the enemy has fired, only that they may fire, and the fact that they are enemies is generally all the warning anyone needs. At short range--a few thousands of kilometers--lasers can be quite effective. At any other range, they are largely useless.

So what weapon remains in the regime of space warfare? Why, the humble missile. And by humble, I of course mean huge, complex, and incredibly expensive.

Any good missle is essentially just a spacecraft made as small as possible to deliver a dangerous payload across the distance required. Since modern spacecraft can warp space, so too must missiles. Ironically, although they travel much closer to the speed of light than manned vehicles safely can, warp-powered missiles are still slower than photonic weapons. They more than make up for this with the ability to maneuver.

Such missiles are generally fired from extreme range. Their range is limited by the fuel for their onboard fusion reactors, which in turn powers their warp drives. The largest military long-range missiles are designed to cross entire solar systems, capable of hours of flight, even approaching days for certain special-purpose missiles. Smaller missiles can easily fly for tens of minutes, crossing (naturally) tens of light-minutes in the process. The least warp-capable missiles can effectively be fired from an inner solar system toward enemies at the outer fringe of the planetary disc.

When they reach their target--a point in space a few kilometers from the ship they're trying to destroy, these missiles fire off an array of fission bombs, carefully arranged to pump high-energy X-rays in a highly localized direction. Modern military missiles give off over 90% of their explosive energy within 0.1 degrees of the target. At 10 km, that puts most of the energy within a 100m radius of the target, generally small enough for the larger ships that might warrant such an attack.

There is little conceivable method to armor a ship against such assault. Hundreds of meters of lead would noticeably decrease the effect, but a ship coated in so much lead would be expensive and immobile. Instead, warships use a wide array of countermeasures (such as non-warp missiles, lasers, flak cannons, EMPs, and electronic decoys) to disable or deflect as many missiles as they can. Any that make it through the screen, the ship will attempt to block with lightning-fast adjustments to the warp shield system (assuming it is active). A warp-capable missile can bear down at nearly 90% the speed of light, granting little warning about its exact vector, so the position of its attack must be determined within nanoseconds. Of course, many missiles are armed with electronic and physical counter-counter-measures to try to blind the systems that deflect and defend against them. This has led inevitably to an arms race, where the side that can put the most missiles in space fastest usually wins.

This is, of course, all relevant to military capital ships. Rangers do not fly dreadnaughts or destroyers, but much smaller ships incapable of carrying a single warp missile.

Asymmetric Warfare

The above is all very interesting, totally original (if you never read David Weber's books), and utterly irrelevant to Rangers.

Rangers fly through the most variable space of all. Enemies may exist, and they may not. They may have sticks and stones, they may have ray guns. If you roll the dice, they will come up almost every time with one side having a massive advantage over the other. The Queen is hoping that's you. But it isn't always.

Leaving aside questions of how to deal with angry stone-age humanoids--most a moral question, not a technological one--let's simplify the scope. Your enemies have guns, maybe lasers or even a few missiles. You have standard Ranger ships and equipment. What happens?

Given the wide variety of possible dangers one might face, Ranger ships are not equipped with military-grade armor. Such armor must be custom-designed for the specific threat, and that threat isn't known. They are a bit tougher than ordinary civilian ships, but mostly on account of the expected amount of wear and tear, and the minimal access to drydock for refit. It just so happens that the armor on a typical landing craft--meant primarily to protect from reentry heat, solar and cosmic radiation, and blowback from vertical landing--isn't too shabby in a firefight against handheld kinetic weapons. These aren't the tin cans we sent to the moon in 1969--they do have metal armor, to a degree.

That said, a proper anti-aircraft missile or laser is a very dangerous thing. One hit could be deadly--and if it doesn't bring the ship down, it may just as well render it incapable of achieving orbit, which in some cases is just as deadly. Given the wide variety of possible attack forms that Rangers may encounter, countermeasures are fairly basic and broad-spectrum. The best advice from Ranger Command is "don't get hit". When pressed, the best way to achieve this, is of course "run away, or if you can't, hit them first".

The best defense system to be found on a Ranger mission is located within the cranium of any of the human personnel on board. The brain can provide all the flexibility and creativity needed to adapt to hostile and unfamiliar territory. When in doubt, avoid danger. When outnumbered, call for backup. Only madmen go into battle with a disadvantage, or where they can't be sure of their advantage.

That being said, there is one powerful tool available to some Ranger missions, applicable to a wide variety of dangerous situations and useful no matter what hardware you possess: psychic prescience.

Psychic Warfare

No one has yet built any weapon or defensive system that can see into the future or violate the speed of light. Yet Psions do so every day. A properly trained Psion can make up for enormous gaps in tactical capability. A warship would never dream of facing off against an enemy without a vast network of drones feeding back intel from every angle, and banks of supercomputers processing the inputs from thousands of electronic eyes and radar dishes, attempting to predict the enemy ship's actions a crucial nanosecond faster than the attacker can spring them.

Meanwhile, a Psion can offer superior predictive power to any Ranger unit with any technology. She can tell you if a planet contains hostiles, if seemingly innocent aliens harbor secret murderous intent, or a "dead" asteroid belt contains the minds of dozens of pirates waiting to start up their fighter craft when you fall into their range. Perhaps most crucially--at least in the field of space battle--she can predict attacks happening too fast for sensors or human senses.

For this reason, Ranger motherships are equipped with military-grade warp cores capable of generating gravitic shields. The necessary hardware and computing power needed to operate such a shield automatically is minimal, and would be useless against all but the most obsolete, malfunctioning warp missiles. But under the direction of a trained Psion, the shield can mean the different between life and death. And best of all, it is effective against almost all known forms of natural and artificial danger in space: missiles, cosmic rays, gravity waves, hard radiation, micrometeorites, even kinetic kill vehicles of reasonably small size.

Ground Warfare

As previously mentioned, ground warfare hasn't needed to evolve much beyond the 21st century, given that the primary target hasn't changed much since then either. A few edge cases--such as terrestrial defense (aka hiding in caves)--have better solutions in modern day, such as robot swarms, mass drivers, or good ol' nukes from orbit, but generally speaking, in military encounters, self-propelled kinetic and explosive weapons still dominate the battlefield, with a small niche for plasma cutters and laser missile defenses sprinkled in.

But Rangers aren't concerned with the tactics of the Royal Marines invading a planet. They are concerned with small-scale, mixed-unit ground combat. They expect ambush, snipers, tripmines, and hell, even tiger pits and rope nets. They need a solid defense--and surely 5,000 years of technology can help.

The number one improvement in this area is armor. While lightweight combat armor is not all that different from its 21st century equivalent--i.e. lifesaving against small arms, but not invulnerable--there are heavier and more powerful options. Full unpowered combat armor is a bit much for aggressive diplomacy, but it does have the advantage of shrugging off moderate-caliber bullets and even grenades. And then, of course, there's Power Armor, which turns a human into a walking tank.

While the technology to miniaturize a fusion reactor and warp core to human scale to provide shielding remains the stuff of science fiction, there are a number of cutting-edge technologies that Rangers can take advantage of:

Idea Bin

The primary limiting factor for all kinds of sci-fi devices is power generation. However it is that you can turn 1.21 gigawatts into time travel is less important than the known limitations on power generation--i.e. that nothing that can generate 1.21 gigawatts can possibly fit into a DeLorean. Any lower-powered device is even more far-fetched--how exactly do you propose we craft a deflector shield, a repulsor beam, or a transporter beacon using the energy in a typical smartphone battery?

The solution, it seems, is to provide denser power sources. But therein lies the problem--the very same limiting our EV range, our smartphone battery life, etc. To condense power into a small space, you must have some means of doing so, preferably with a means of retrieving said power safely on demand, and with minimal chance of the power source exploding. The more power crammed in there, the harder that challenge is, even before you answer the question "how did you cram it in there?". And even assuming you succeed in stuffing a smartphone with 100x the normal battery life...now you have a wonderful little bomb in your pocket. Just how badly did you want that repulsor beam? How much danger are you willing to put your kids in to have a flying car? Is it okay if the car just might explode with the force of a small nuke if you ding its bumper?

But perhaps, in that criticism, we find the solution. The key difficulties seem to be cramming in the necessary energy "such that it can be safely released" and "without the likelihood of it exploding". But what if it was meant to do exactly that?

Many devices far older than smartphone batteries pack energy denser than they do. They're called bombs. They are reasonably safe to transport--not as safe as phones, maybe, but as safe as bombs--and they do a fine job of producing the energy on demand...just not safely or repeatably. But couldn't we work around that limitation?

Perhaps some enterprising, mildly insane inventor could imagine a whole line of single-use, bomb-pumped devices that do all the sci-fi things we need done--only once, with a bit of splash damage? Depending on what you need it for, that may be an acceptable design compromise. Let's imagine a few.

Bomb-pumped miniaturized high-power devices:

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